From Gang Life to Healing Educational Communities: Carlos Alvarez on the Brain Science of Connection

Transcript auto-generated from the episode audio; formatting has been cleaned up, but wording is verbatim.

95% of my friends are in prison or dead. What was the difference between them? And I was I always had a very strong sense of self. I had enough insight to listen. You could convince your mind of almost anything, but you can convince your central nervous system of who you work. Now, like when I say the most rehabilitated gang member is the individual who's able to merge both experience emotion and happen, but it's also able to experience that forgiveness aspect. I did do that thing, but I'm also capable of doing good. I'm Cynthia Marks and I head up the Holistic Psychoanalysis Foundation, established by my late husband, Doctor Bernard Bail.

Welcome to And Now Love. Today we're talking about what it actually takes to heal a community and change how we look at conflict. My guest is Carlos Alvarez, the founder of LAIRP, The Los Angeles Institute for Right Brain Practices. That's a lot to contend with. Carlos uses the science of how our brains process emotions to redesign school discipline, stop community violence, and help people truly connect. That's the big part. Truly connect. It's great to have you here. Thank you so much for joining us. Welcome. And I'm really excited to share what your organization does with our audience. I am super excited.

Cynthia, thank you for having me here. You're so busy and we appreciate you taking out the time. So not busy for you. Thank you. So first tell us about you. How did you come to do what you're doing? A little bit about your history. My history could be a little bit boring. However, the interactions that now are a little bit more stimulating. Grew up first generation Mexicano. My both parents were ranchers from while I grew up in the beautiful city of Maywood, southeast Los Angeles went through the course of K through 12 school systems like, you know, a lot of us. And through that, I was able to to engage in different situations.

You know, one of the the focuses for myself and my journey really goes back to the struggle of growing up and being able to be with that struggle and allow the process to guide me wherever I needed to go. And I think that's where I'm currently at now. Was that something you were aware of then? Like, these are my circumstances. Let me see how I maneuver in and through these circumstances. Or was that sort of a looking back? I see what was going on there. So I grew up, you know, with a lot of love in the very formative years. You know, my father and my mother had a very I had a very good first 1000 days.

And a lot of the research states that optimal self-regulation is established through that. And I had a really good upbringing with my parents. During adolescence, something happened. There was a lot of issues with our with domestic violence, and I never saw the violence of physical hits or anything in my family, but I saw more of the of the yells and a lot more of the disconnect. So I grew up in an environment where dysregulation and survival was very, very present and needed. And throughout that journey, I was able to regulate with the individuals that I encountered. And through that journey of awakening, every time when dolls would help me reach moments of of understanding, that's where I would get these little nuggets of direction through that fast forward.

You know, there was a lot of situations that I engaged through. I met amazing people. I was getting involved. I was addicted to drugs at a very young age, 14. I was addicted to meth. I was already getting involved at age 15, being a very highly spirited young man. I had a lot of love inside of me, a lot of fire. And, you know, thinking about, you know, my journey growing up. What happens? Where do you put a lot of that fire? As a young man, I grew up in a city where there's about 16 streets, main streets and about 14 gangs. Oh my goodness. So what does a young, highly spirited young man do? And this is this.

This was my experience. Our city was very impoverished with community resources, so. But wouldn't that be the draw for most young men and women in a community where that is pervasive? Absolutely. Sense of belonging at the end of the day? Yeah. You know, a lot of us go into it like, hey, you're you're choosing to engage in that lifestyle. And I never chose like, hey, I want to get into a gang. It was more around. Things were unfolding without control. It's almost something that just happens to you. Exactly. And next thing you know, like, wow, I'm fully in this situation that created a lot of pain in my life and more separation because you become very idealistic in the way you think when you're a gang member, you have the them in us versus mentality.

So connection was difficult. I was pushed out of a lot of systems, schools. I was pushed out of a lot of centers that focused on rehabilitation and connection and helping youth get out of gangs. Because you were seen as bad or there was no way to, let's say, rehabilitate. One of the biggest words that would get thrown out there is he's unconscious. And I was like, wow, that's a big word. I didn't even know what it meant. And now, thinking about it, I was in the midst with a lot of dysregulated adults that couldn't access those mechanisms to connect at my level. Can you just give us a general description of that word dysregulated, just so our audience.

When your central nervous system is in a state of dysregulation, is in a state of stress, your stress levels are heightened. And when your stress levels are heightened, there's certain elements that create this exposure of dysregulation. Your autonomic nervous system is is active. You're overflowing with cortisol. So there's a lot of different situations that are happening in your body and in your brain that are primarily focused on survival. Yeah. And so that is unique to every individual. Yes. Based on their antecedent experience based on their first 1000 days. A lot of the research, specifically the work of Alan Shaw, you know, identifying the attachment theory with Bowlby, and now it's becoming a biological theory, and now it's experiencing this entire feeling of what is happening to me.

We used to use this very one way of thinking of how to deal with situation, and it was very much the person is going to come to their own conclusions by themselves. You know, now we're moving towards this science of synchrony and interpersonal psychology, where you need another person to help you get out of that sadness, help you. And I feel my experience growing up with a lot of my friends experience the same thing. We didn't have a lot of the literature, a lot of the language, and a lot of the trainings that we have now that explain a child that was going through what I was going through. So it becomes very scary whenever, you know, as a professional, you don't know how to deal or how to care for another person.

You get into the state of, I don't know what to do. And that could be scary for a lot of people. It can be. So you and probably many of your peers just learned to think of yourselves as incorrigible or bad, and then you sort of live that life. You know, the I consistently reflect in my life, Cynthia, because a lot of my friends, the question comes, Carlos, how did you get here? How did you get here? 95% of my friends are in prison or dead that I grew up with. So sorry. Maybe have 1 or 2 that are up there and we still we follow each other on Instagram. But when you start thinking about what was the difference between them and I was I always had a very strong sense of self as a young child.

And when you think about it now, how did that happen? Well, you know, that was formed through my first 1000 days, and there was always this internal voice inside of me. And now what we call this the witness. And I feel that I had enough insight to listen. And and that was just part of your package as you were delivered to this earth. I guess so. Well, it's a magical situation. I feel, you know, the work of of the environment. I also had a very amazing elementary teacher. Her name was Miss Medina. So Miss Medina is listening. She she just changed a lot of the way and how I viewed life at that time.

She was able to establish reestablish that attachment. You know, we call it we call it urn attachment. And she helped me really connect those angles. She allowed me to feel that sense of safety again with another adult, that external sense of safety, that wait, I only thought that this was possible with my parents. I could experience it with other people, and that was very intrigued at that time. Yes. So that would allow you a sense of safety and sort of a knowledge that somewhere you would always be able to find some guidance and a loving attachment. But meanwhile you were you were still with your peers and still becoming invested in the gang experience.

When I got into middle school, I went into middle school really loving learning. I fell in love with everything school from having your pencil to having your backpack. I was that type of person going into middle school. Which is pretty unusual in middle school. Yes, yes, I had really good examples. My mother was a professional woman. She went back to school being first generation. She just. I just saw that from my mother. I was like, wow, that really intrigued me and my mother. My father always talked to me about, hey, this is the way out. You know, you learn, you build. So I was always intrigued.

I remember Chester W Nimitz and I went in there scared, you know, like going into a new environment. New environment is foreign for for a young child. And now you're like, well, what's happening? A little hypersensitive. So I go into first period, we get our classes and I'm, you know, kind of lost. And I think everyone's nice in school. So, you know, remember I'm coming out of fifth grade. So I kind of know everyone. Now you're coming into a middle school where six through eight I'm looking for this class. I remember it was like B10, and I see this older student come up to me and he's like, hey, what track are you in?

And I was like, oh, I'm an eight track. And Bowie punches me in the face. And I was like, like, think about school. Scary. I don't know what's going to happen to I am I going to have friends? I haven't seen my friends or like kind of scared to. And next thing I get hit by this person. First day. First day. Oh my God. And I was like my brother. I had an older brother. My older brother is in high school now. He's not in the same school. So it's all my it's all by myself. The same feelings came when I experienced a lot of the violence and a lot of the separation at home. The lack of safety immediately came in and flooded my brain and versus coming in there and hey, I want to I want to really excel in school.

I immediately refuge to seeking safety. Yeah, well, I went into homeroom that same day and I met one of my real a real good friend became my best friend. He was, and bald. He was already from a gang. And I remember how he would walk and how he would act and how he would carry himself and people would just open up. There was this actual respect but fear. And I was like, I want that, I like that. And hanging around more and more with him, I was initiated into the gang I got. It's called a check. Like you get courted in and I got courted in on the bottom of my home room outside of Mr. Cornelius classroom.

So I got, you know, beaten by a couple of individuals. And you're from the neighborhood now. And now you think about it, how primitive you get hit, and now your love. But now you start thinking about it. Central nervous system is always going to remember that when you don't have experiences of positive joy to stimulate CNS, you start looking at other situations and you start normalizing that. So I was like, okay, I'm part of the game, part of the neighborhood. And this, this feeling of of, hey, you're part of something. But this overwhelming feeling of you messed up like your this is not who you are.

But I would ignore it and I would suppress that voice. Two days passed and I had the same guy that punched me in the face, came back and gave me $5, and I was like, this was weird. There was no one around. He just gave me $5 and he's like, hey man, I'm sorry. I did that. And he folded into $5 and he was like, I was like, what the hell? I guess this is what we do now. And I remember telling my friend that and he's like, yeah, that's what happens now, dude, because he knows if he wouldn't have made it right, there was going to be issues with him. I was like, wow, just like that. And now think about that self-esteem happening at that age declaration.

Everything's happening so sour. Exactly, exactly. It was so tasty. And that pushed me. Yeah. At that age, at that age. Having people having different friendships. So, you know, you're in the state of manipulating who you are. You have implicit self-esteem, explicit self-esteem, who you want to be and who you are and who I wanted it to be. I was going to be that person that propelled my life, you know, like living like this dissociative life. I knew I wasn't that person coming back home to a very structured family. My father was a hard working man. I never saw my father in a dictionary, anything.

, comes back at 330, is in the gym at four, comes back at 730. Make sure he cleans the home. Go to sleep. Wow. Very wretched. My mother the same. We always had that situation. I would go to my friends homes and I was like, they look, it's very different. So quiet in here. There's a lot of silence. There's a lot of trauma. You know, now, knowing the homes are very different. That same friend they got me into the neighborhood, got killed a few years later. So it was just a lot of that. He left a beautiful young girl and wife, and it was just devastating. But that that became my life. You know, I started to meet different people, engaged in more situations, and I got expelled from all the from at least my immediate school.

And they're like, no, Carlos is getting involved. We don't want him in like, the normal high schools. You need to go to independent study program. I was like, what is that? You're only going to go to school one day a week because we can't deal with your behavior. That wasn't like a lot of the language. We can deal with you. We don't want you here. So now hearing it, you know, I was an administrator for many years. I'm like, damn, the type of language. I don't want you here. It's heartbreaking. Yeah. Like, then how do you want me to follow your rules? How do you want me to be? Great. If you if if I'm not, you know, start manifesting that behavior.

So I went to City of Angels in Southgate, Liberty Street. I still remember that my mother was very active at that point. We were in this journey of, I need to get my son out of the gang. m.. The commitment that my mother said, you know what? I'm going to take you. You're not going to take the bus, you're not going to, you're going to get killed. So my mother would take her lunch break. She would eat on her car, pick me up, drop off. And I was like, drop off your homework. She would ask her, her bosses, her supervisors. God bless them. They're really nice, amazing people. But they're like, yeah, we're going to make sure that Cardinal stays on point to.

So work on it. We saw a mom working hard and she would wait. She would come out on the lab coat. She was a receiving chemist. She did a lot of hazmat in organic chemistry. I was a very brilliant woman, very smart woman. And it took that focus and that intensity to get me out of the neighborhood and get me out of that mindset. City of angels I met Mrs. Susan Carroll. Is City of Angels, the. Independent studies okay I'm program so City of Angels independent school. I went in there with 16 years of age, 30 credits for a counselor like, wow, Carlos, that's really bad. You're supposed to have like, over 100.

Whatever. I didn't know how to write, how to complete an essay. I didn't know anything of them. My main focus was going to school, hitting up people, making sure that we promoted the gang, and we made sure that we need to engage in maladaptive behavior. That was my focus. Fast forward meeting. Miss Carol really did something to me having that. She's a white lady and I grew up in the city of Maywood. Not a lot of white people in that city. So when you're thinking about it, you have also all this indoctrination, all this thinking of like, don't trust others and don't be with others. And I was just I didn't see that through this experience.

And she just saw me. It was weird. It was this connection. Now we identified through synchrony that empathy. And that changed my life, that relationship. She was at anchor for me during that time and she's like, you're really smart. I don't know why you're being dumb. And she would say that. I was like, wow, you're so real to me, I like this. That's no excuse, y'all, to not be professional with kids. But like, she knew I was a heart, like I was embedded. So it's a different twist. And she's like, you're amazing. We're going to help you be better. And she knew that I was a hard working person. So I was going independent study.

And I had a job in Jetro. I remember I bought my mama refrigerator with my first check and I just wanted to do it, and she loved that. And she started really kind of I feel like taking me under her wing, and she was connecting with me at a different angle. She wasn't doing like these foreign situations, but she was just real. And she saw me and she was very much restorative with me because she would do things with me. I was able to I mean, she told me and I was with her for about three years, and she told me, you know, when you graduate your high school diploma, what do you want? I'm like, I want you to drink a beer with my dad.

She's like, okay, I'll do that. She delivered my high school diploma, drink a beer with my dad. Oh, pushed me out. So that's where I knew the quality of education, what it was all about. Like, oh, this is what a real teacher is. She made me fall in love with school, like. And before you met her, you couldn't imagine having this turnaround. Absolutely not. People. Now to the steamer like Carlos. How the hell are you doing that? What the hell are you doing? The people that really grew up with me. Now, when you think about it, everything lives on this right side of the brain. The right axis and orbital frontal cortex.

Right executive regular of the right brain. My amygdala was dysregulated. You know, the way of how I was connected. She allowed that to regulate based on the connection, based on the regulation. And she allowed me to get out of survival and come into the present moment. That's where. Carlos, what do you want to do with your life? What would you like to do? I was like, wow. I was able to think about things differently. You know, and that was making sense. Well, like, wow, I could do this. So that pushed me into academia. You know, I started I went into work and I wanted to do different. I wanted to be a person that influenced changed.

And a lot of people would say, you're real. You're a real good talker. You really good give good motivation. You know, you should work with youth. I'm like, I don't know. I don't know about youth. At that time, I was like, I want to do, I want to be a business owner. I want to do what I want to do. So I got into bodybuilding and fast forward I was able to open up a supplement store. This was like I was 19, very young, me and my wife Mary. Yeah, it was in the city of Downey. So we opened it up and it was super scary situation. And that took me into the world of bodybuilding. Scary because you were taking a chance.

And will this succeed? Won't it succeed? Well, this has I have never seen an example of this. I never seen how to even start up a business. No one in my immediate family has ever done that. And will that succeed is like, you know, what is this all about? You know? And it's also like your self-esteem when it's a little impoverished. You really don't have a lot of trust in yourself. And I haven't had, at least at that moment. I didn't have a lot of those small wins that I could say, hey, this was all you. I was like, you know what I'm looking for? I could, I think I could, you know, work with kids.

Yeah. Like, you know, they they're like, how do you work out? You know, like Mr.. And so I'm like, I think I could connect with him. And I remember I was asked like, hey, can you volunteer at a camp for us? And this was the opening factor. Like, this is how Carlos became Mr. Alvarez in this world. And I said, yeah, sure, I'll do it. My wife was working in probation program, so she's like, hey, babe, you really like working with youth? Try it out. You're really good with them. Saturday she dropped me off and I saw the parents like it was a camp for high risk youth that were in probation. They were taking parents and children were going to go up to a campground.

And there was a program. There was, you know, things that were going to do up there. And I went up there with zero experience just being me, life experience. And when I got up there, they're like, hey, Carlos, can you talk to the parents about like, what can they do with their kids? I was like, okay. I'll like, well, well, what do I say? He goes, you have everything. I remember her name was Floating Gutierrez. You have everything that they need to know inside of you. I remember one mother opened it up. She says, I want my kid to be like you. And I say, like me, you do not know what I've been through.

And I said, I. And I started giving a little bit about my story, and they were so intrigued and I would say, like the connection and how I started pushing through. And they were like, yes, how do we get our kids to do that? So then I started thinking like, wait, let me think about that, because I don't know what. I just knew that I was just doing the things and that opened up that world for me. And really identifying these mechanisms that changed at least would help me. And I started doing a lot of work with parents through that experience. Floating that called me the following week says, do you want to be our parent coordinator?

I was like, wow, I told my wife, hey, baby. You know, they they asked me for a check because this is you, you're good for it. And I was hired, excelled in that job. I started doing a lot of work and with youth and my specialization was gangs, gang youth, specifically Hispanic gang members. And, you know, there's a very different way of engaging a Hispanic gang member. It's very much rooted in different situations. Do you do you mean because of a generational, cultural yes thing that's going on that's different from community? Community? Yeah. There's a Hispanic gang. It's really by politics. There's a lot of expectations and rules.

Not saying that other gangs don't have that, but there's even language and engagement and actions and processes that are very unique to the Hispanic gang population. I see. Would you obviously knew very, very well. Very well, very well. For a lot of individuals that do gang work, it's like a very, very intense type of art that they engage in. The a lot of these individuals have to have what they call license to operate LTO to work with game. You can't just say, hey, I'm feeling nice today. I want to work with gang members. That doesn't happen that way. Yeah, it's very different. I was pushed through through many of those aspects.

My specialization was was working with that because I knew that we can't just rip a kid out of the game. It does it. It has to somehow develop into a desire that comes from within. Has to be endogenous. It can be exogenous. Change comes within because life gets very difficult. Life is hard. And when we think about when we're motivating the child to reduce TVNZ or maladaptive behavior, because you never leave the gang, you could convince your mind of almost anything, but you can convince your central nervous system of who you were. I see the hey, where are you from? You might hear it somewhere else and might trigger you a little bit.

Yeah, that happens to me, you know. And here I am, this professional guy talking about the brain. And I'll still hear that. I'll still hear the certain whistles that we used to use in the steel. Like, these are things that are in your CNS now, like when I say the most rehabilitated gang members, the individual who's able to merge both, you know, this dual lateralization could could experience the emotion and what happened, but is also able to experience that forgiveness aspect, that shame doesn't get overwhelmed with shame. I did do that thing, but I'm also capable of doing good. Yes. Which I think almost all of us, if we dug deep enough, could see that we have experiences in our life that are triggers, and then how do we deal with those triggers?

Absolutely. And for a lot of us that have a lot of the safety mechanisms well-established, we're able to navigate through that. But if we come from shame based environments, it's like this big, heavy weight. It pulls at you. Pulls at you, and it doesn't allow you to say, I am good. Working with a lot of high level gang members, I would hear, Carlos, I am rotten inside. Yeah. And it was hard for me because they wouldn't they. It was different with the other ones. I would say, hey, I fed up a lot, but this person is I internalized the core belief of myself and stuff comes out of that. So my, my work was a lot of that of navigating that also not getting killed in the in, in, in the midst of working in gang environments, there's Drive-Bys, there's people still engaging in the normal business.

I remember. And that you say normal business. Yeah. Like when you're working with youth or, you know, at that level of street intervention, it's that I remember I was in an park doing work with the grid program when it was a pilot. I was in an park and they wanted to to kill an individual there. And I was his case manager. And, you know, when you're greenlighted, when they want you, they're going to get you. And it doesn't matter where doesn't matter, don't care if it's anything other certain rules. Right. There's certain politics. But sometimes when you're in dismissed of drug addiction dysregulation you don't.

It's so animalistic. It's so implicit, you know, so quick. So sometimes rules get violated, you know, and these situations happen. Got shot at ten times. Oh my God. And you know, this was just this is what tells me like I am supposed to be here. I wasn't I saw the person, I saw his face, I saw his eyes. And I remember seeing so much anger and despair in his eyes. And I was like, whoa. And I'm like, looking at him. And I'm like, trying to connect as being human, like man. I'm a human being. And I just saw so much like this flat affect. I remember I was going to finishing up a master's degree in forensics, and I remember my professor flat affect flat at this, and it was just making sense.

And he just went at it. I remember seeing the gun shot ten times group of people. And I remember thinking. Am I shot? Am I didn't panic out or anything and got up. Everything got really quite a lot of panic and I wasn't shot, the kid wasn't shot. And the following day like, okay, what do we do? Carlos Alvarez what do we do? What do we do? Hey, man, we need to get you out of here. So you're going to go shipped out. Mom, where can we take him? Can we? So we. How do we develop that? I immediate in crisis. That's why I'm so good in crisis mediation. Like, okay, this just happened. Okay, let me tap back in.

Let me get back into. I'm the one dealing with this. And that was the type of environment. There's been a lot of interventions that have lost their life doing that work. Not because I'm going to do this to you. Intervention is because you get caught up in the crossfire. You get caught up in situations. I did that a lot of that work, and I was able to land a really good, really good position doing gang work. Miranda helping our youth more on the focus of forensics. How can we get how can we really help these very highly gang embedded youth like, yes, that's what I want. We always working with a lot of high risk.

But now you're going to be working with Gang Embedded. 5% of the individuals in a gang. Usually you have your normal gang members that discontinue gang involvement within the two years. This is, you know, the lot of the work that that identifies that. Is that pretty typical? That's very typical. So, you know, you usually get into the neighborhood, you'll be in the gang, you'll hang out with the neighborhood, and it usually dies out, you know, like that. You'll get married, you get a baby and you kind of dies out and you're like, okay, I'm going to leave. I'll be still from the neighborhood. I'm still declarative, but I'm not kicking it.

I'm not doing all that stuff anymore. From that, you have a 5%. That's like 95%. You have a 5% gang member. That 5% is the individuals who are engaging in the retaliatory shooting, who are keeping the politics alive, who are pushing the gang ahead. That's the focus that I worked with. Very different psychology, very different way of engaging with them, because now it's their entire DNA. You have to engage an entire epigenetic experience to get them out of that experience. It's a gene experience, like they don't know what it is to sit in a circle with that dude killed my older brother, or his homeboy did this to me, and I'm talking about him.

This is. And you're saying sorry, that's going to I've never that looks as weakness with my people. So there's a lot of that that starts happening. So that was my specialty. That was my group of people. And that was like what I did my work on, on right brain. So I was working with the mayor's office, Antonio Villaraigosa, he brought something called gang reduction Youth development through the Advancement Project. And there's a lot of money now getting flooded to the city of LA to help out with this amazing situation. Right. But our initiative was the pilot, Carlos, we don't know what this looks like.

It was me and my partner, Doctor Gomez. We went out there very smart young men and young lady. Let's give the world our love and remember going. And we had our caseload of 25 highly gang embedded. I'm talking about youth with tats in the face. Very declarative, but wanting to connect the most nicest individuals that you could ever meet. How did you come together? So they were identified through. There was a an initiative through through the mayor's office, where students who are youth that were either in probation or in Cal gangs or identified as or referred by other individuals within the community.

Because this initiative of Grid was the individuals that work there had to have some relationships within the community. So there was a lot of trust. G. or we know that you're going to help us out. So that would happen a lot of self referrals. So that program was really, really good with that because it had individuals that could tap into those individuals that are very, very covert, very, very covered. You didn't see them in the streets that much. So that was most of my work waiting for respond to someone got shot so you could do victims assistance and go talk to the mom and dad. And my focus was youth under 16 and 14 age.

So I was doing a lot of the conversations with parents around, hey, your kid got shot, or I would hear that, or, hey, how can I don't have money to bury my kid? Okay. Victims assistance. I became really good in filling out those documentations. My gosh. And that's so obviously it's it's tragic for the people that you're assisting, but also tragic for you. You know, you go into these moments of of awakening. I feel whenever you hear a mother yell when she lost her son, it's just a different type of of piercing sound. And those moments brought me back to what do I have? I have a family. I'm breathing, I'm here.

And when I was into that work, I remember I experienced something called compassion fatigue, you know, and the psychologists not like whatever these types of psychological phenomena, it's happening. And I got very depressed. Imagine the countertransference all day dealing with that. I remember going to homes after this individual got shot, got killed. We were helping mother and I'm like, hey, mother just lost. This is her fourth kid. She lost like that, okay? And this is a known gang home we have now everyone in this house. So I remember I would me and my partner would put our head right where the beans are at.

So in case they do shoot, they don't shoot us in the head. That was the type of experience I was like. And that was 22, 24 years old. I remember the sense of heaviness and the sense of just pain and despair inside of me, and I'm like, everything's going well, you know? And we're getting married. I had my fiance. Everything was going great, you know, I'm going to school. Everything looks great. But it was I could not pinpoint. It didn't have the language. I didn't have the skills to identify that I was burning out. This was too much by curious trauma. And I remember I'm not religious. I'm very spiritual.

But I wasn't religious. My parents wouldn't take us to church or anything like that. My role was like, hey, driving around what we call drive around the grid, wait for stuff to happen. And that was my day. I'll park in the parking lot and get a colleague, hey, we're going here. So I remember I'm like, hey, I have about an hour. I'm going to go. I'm just going to go to this church. It was called Santa Rosa de Lima. I don't know why I did that. m. and I remember there was this lady that would come and start singing. She would turn on the water works for me. Oh, and it was just like pouring out. But now you think about it, you connect it back to science.

Cortisol. You think about now that discharge and this moment of community. And I feel that that was my therapy, my moment of having a conversation with the great creator. And those moments really helped me out. Coupled with, you know, seen a therapist after that? A lot of our students, I keep on calling them students because they're all they're young. You know, a lot of the the clients, the individuals that I would encounter were under 16. I'm like, why are you out here, man? m.. Aren't you supposed to be in school? He goes, yeah. Mr.. They kicked me out. They don't want me there. They kicked me out for ten days.

What? And they would show me suspensions for seven days. Six days. I was like, and you want this like you want to be out of school? He goes, yeah. Now I could be out of school. They're not at home reflecting. They're not at home doing chores. Parents are working heavy hours. So these kettles, what happens to idle hands, specially when you're in an environment like that, especially if you have a hint of gang involvement. You get into the you see more deviance, more maladaptive behavior. So some of what you were doing was just as simple as finding a kid out at 11:00 at night and having a conversation with him.

That was it. That was my way of doing the work the right way. I wasn't waiting for a paper. I was driving around and I would go to parks because I knew I was. I was a kid at that age, I experienced that, hey, man, you want we're having a barbecue on the weekend? I don't want that man. Who are you? You're weird. Like, look, I get it, but, like, you want a job. Yeah. What's up? Can you give me some money? Yeah. Yeah, man. Look, look, we got this. And it was always. I try to use every angle to connect, like, okay, you come this weekend, man, and other people from neighborhoods. You think we could do that?

I'll immediately work with intervention. And. Yeah, I'm down and we'll start having that conversation. Next thing you know, we have them on job skills readiness program and training. This factor of I live off this this theory, when I get asked Carlos, what do you have under your your belt that I don't as a, as a person that works with gang youth? Well, I know this experience one but I live off the discontinuance factor. You increase positive, you decrease negative, you increase prosocial. Hey man, after that, do you want to go to this workout gym group? Because that thing worked out all right.

You survived. You did more than survive. First, they will experience these small micro moments of synchrony with the individuals that are working with. And when you use the word synchrony in your world, explain to us. Connection before you are able to feel or gain empathy or, you know, feel empathy for another person, there needs to be a connection. There needs to feel that I am here with him or her. And whenever you're able to experience that with a child, say that's been highly gang involved and say, as Carlos Alvarez, resetting that situation and being there and being present non-judgmental, you're able to establish synchrony, feeling the same feeling at once.

And it is possible that those two individuals who are now feeling this synchrony can come from two different worlds. Absolutely. We first experienced synchrony with the practitioner, the caseworker, the people that know how to engage these skills, and then we see them with other individuals. First, they have to feel safety with themselves. They have to feel safety with another human being. I knew working in schools was the next thing for me. I said, you know what? I see a lot of these youth here in the streets. I'm really good with youth. I want to go in and I want to have more access to you. And sure enough, I went in there and I applied and they're like, Carlos, we have a 127 students that we spend a year here like.

You are the problem. This is why we're having kids. And my mind, I was like, I seen it in the street. What you do. So and they're like, you think with your experience you think you could change. I'm like, absolutely, I'm not going to suspend them. Of course I know. I'm like not to send them home. And I'm like, well, yeah, with confidence. But I didn't know what the hell was doing. Like systems like, no, I don't even know what. No, absolutely. I know all the psychological theories. But working in a school is a very different situation. But obviously here you had been for some period of time finding these kids out on the street who had been consistent, suspended.

And and it must have come to you that. Wait a minute. Maybe they don't have to get to this stage. Let me go to the school where we can maybe stop that from happening. Because I was getting a lot of the data from them that I am not like that school. And that was so magically familiar for myself because I wasn't like that school and I was like, damn, things have really not changed. And now when I would go into schools, I would see a lot of the treatment, you know, the disciplinarian would have with a lot of our high risk kids, you know, highly well. I call them highly spirited scholars. And I was like, okay, I can't change everyone, but I could do it myself.

I could figure this out and that that was the motivator behind it. I was hired immediately. Within a couple of days, I got the call and they're like, yeah, we want you to be our dean of of student conduct. Wow. I was like, okay, cool. I just had finished my master's. I was like, yeah, I'm game for this. Let me sit down and think about what this means. Exactly. That's it. I told my wife, hey, baby, it looks like I got the job. She goes, oh, I'm so proud of you. Congratulations. I'm like, but how do you dress as a dean? Be like, remember, this is almost 16 years. Like, it's like my vision of a dean was like, you look boring and you're mean.

I don't want to look like that. So I'm like, okay, well, let me dress up in the suit every day. And I would. That was my first couple years as a dean. But kids saw that, you know, kids love that. And that propelled me into the world where I'm at now. Through that, I was like, okay, if I'm going to fight for our youth, I'm not going to go out there and say, hey, I'm going to fight, but I'm going to offer resources. I'm going to offer explanations. Here's this. Dean, you know, I was a bodybuilder at that time. Here's who is this guy think he is. And he's not a teacher. He doesn't have credentials.

He's not an admin. But I knew how to connect. I knew how to mobilize parents. I knew how to do all that. I knew how to reduce violence, what was important and was that school was dealing with. They couldn't teach the brain because violence was so prevalent. So when I went in there like, wow, this suspensions are reduced, things had diminished and it wasn't. I was doing a lot, but the thing that I was doing the most was connecting and being present with the youth. So I was developing systems that would infuse restorative practices through the school. What this means is how do you have a conversation of compassion or love with a group of individuals that maybe there's an A and maybe there's pain and history of separation.

You can't just go in there and say to that group, hey, let's talk about compassion. A lot of things are antecedents are going to come out. So when we go in there we're like, hey, how can we? So I understood, like, hey, we could talk about these very emotional words that solicit emotion, but use a vehicle that's going to change the valence, the meaning, the feeling of how I'm having this conversation. , etc. and we're going to have teachers create what do those behaviors look like in class? And those conversations, when they're reflecting with their group they're going to talk about emotions. And that was a vector of success for LAIRP.

And we started doing that. I did that with that school and I saw success. We implemented something called PCAP: perseverance, compassion, self-awareness and professionalism for all my teachers that like that left brain, right, like, okay. But my main focus was perseverance because these kids were coming from West Adams to close to English. m.. How to being sweaty, persevering kids, how do we auxiliary that? Even more so I'm like, hey y'all, you're already persevering. I would remember doing the assembly, introducing the values. You guys are already persevering. You guys are ready doing this. Yeah, yeah we are and we're on it.

Compassion. We're compassionate people. We love others. And it was that. It was the language that we started, in essence, indoctrinating the little brains, using compassion. This is what compassion looks like. And self-awareness. What does it mean to be self-aware? Hey, when you did that with that teacher, what core value that you violate? How was it self-awareness year? We gave students younger brains the language, the ability, you know, if you have if the child has the skills, then they're going to engage in those skills to prevent them from getting in trouble. It's if you don't have the skills, then you're going to resort to what's natural to you.

And sometimes survival is the most closest. And sometimes when things come out of there. So that allowed me to build another factor of joy in school. We incentivized they. We opened up a a student store. We would give chips very, very low level chips, which turned out to become something really big because the whole economy of the core values was like so, so great. So now students were engaging in the behaviors to support, you know, their core values. So how did that that work? What what do you mean by the chips. Through will establish I'll give you an example. Like the word perseverance that was one of their core values, will create some activities with teachers and will identify and externalize.

What does this look like? What does this look like in class? But also what are the opposing behaviors for being for being perseverance, not turning in your work? Coming into class late will identify that so students would get immediately 100 points a week. We would give you 100 points a week. And it's also giving us data to identify which are the behaviors that we're seeing the most with students. So we could okay, we're seeing in the ninth grade more use of profanity, repressive language okay. Curriculum needs to focus on that. 11th grade we're seeing this. So it was very focused how we would do things.

And students would get 100 points a week. They're like, Carlos, why are you doing that? Why are you doing? I was one of the first ones to start doing that work, because I work with that very high frequency student that was engaged in an issue. So I'm like, if that kid will lose their points in two days, so what is his or hers by an factor? To be part of this culture, you got to see that culture. Stupid mystery. I always lose points, so that's not even for me. So you immediately exclude the exclude the student. So the system has to embrace everyone in your school. So my students. Yeah. You had a hard week, right?

But next week is better. You got to reflect on how you why you lost so many points this week. It was in a sense of being punitive. And if you hit a threshold of 80 points we develop something called focus 80. Now you're going to eat lunch with Mr. Alvarez. And it was impunity. We're having circles. And sometimes that was very popular. Sometimes I would have more kids like, hey, can I just I don't I'm not focused 80, but can I sit in that group with you? Sense of belonging. Same thing is we established Saturday boot camp for our kids. I was running it, so I had them work out a little bit in the morning.

But then. Yet we would have a barbecue after it got so popular where kids wanted like Mr. Adam not going to do that, but I'll stay for Saturdays. And that's what really helped us build that situation. So students would get points, they would have a point bank. And Monday and Tuesday the the student store were open up. It was a room in the school. And based on your points you're able to buy Gatorade, a water, say, hey mister, I have 500 points. We even have students that were doing the whole charging out, the students doing the inventory. So it was a very self-contained and self run little process.

And that created a lot of that joy. Everything we did based on culture came out of those core values. So we established common language, but we also established that language for students to use. You know, one of the things that really helped me with my work is I recognize the survival in them. There's a big difference between misbehavior and stress behavior, stress behaviors. When you think about mom, think about that. Maybe experience a dog get run over, which is very traumatizing. That made the less hypersensitive. Now for what we're seeing now is about six hours. So think about now that child coming into school, that amygdala hypersensitive, dysregulated.

Are they going to want to be in task on task. Isn't that a lot for teachers and administration to come to terms with huge and even to want to engage in? They're just trying to make it through the day with their students, the testing, the behavior, and now we're throwing something else at them. One of the biggest things that we hear with teachers are like the life of a teacher, like they've made a commitment of altruism. Like what they do for other people's children is absolutely amazing. It's it's I'm like, you're building your karma to have. One thing that really helps us at LAIRP is that follow a lot of the work of Pat Ogden, sensory motor trauma.

There's something called leakage. If you're experiencing just because you're a teacher, doesn't mean that you're excluded, that you don't feel stress and that you don't engage in toxic stress and you don't get dysregulated. We at LAIRP, we we have started pioneering a lot of that work where we're identifying the stress levels of teachers and helping them build regulation around that. As a teacher, what could you do? Validation. We go in there and talk to them about compassion fatigue, countertransference, synchrony. What does this look like around community circle? Why are you so tired when you go back home?

Why are you saying I'm over this? Carlos educate. We hear this a lot. Education has changed, has changed. And when you think about it, has it really changed? The thing that has significantly change is the high frequency of dysregulation that's coming into schools via students, via families. The disconnect also this this rhetoric out there of fighting the system. Yeah. Let's in certain situations. But when a family goes into a school we become the system. So you know like that perception is always politically. It's consistently like hey how do we how do I fight with that administrator? And a lot of the schools that we work with, a lot of that that parent goes in there like, I'm going to fight for my child.

So she or he could see that I care for them. I'm going to go against this, administer this teacher not knowing that we need a partner up. If we were together, we would be creating more for your child. So coupled with all that, coupled with the volume of students, level of apathy, of dysregulation, and it's not the phones, you know, there's even research now coming out. I might not be popular for that, but it's not the phones that that's you know, we start thinking about what happened to our kids. You know, think about Covid. That took away years. You know, think about a seventh grade or eighth grader where they were like second grader or third grade, you know, and that's when you learned how to socialize, how to share, how to engage in things.

Now we're coming into middle school. We're seeing these behaviors happen. So it's very dysregulated for educators. And it's hard. So then how hard is it to get staff on board in this school? Situations where you've had a big presence, are you able to basically get everyone on board? We change and we change the valence of it. And that's one thing that, you know, our organization takes a stance. I don't go in there saying students first, it's adult first or it's you first, because if you're dysregulated you can't help another child be regulated. So they're like, absolutely. So when they see that, they're like, whoa, this, this organization is really validating in all our science and research and applications and trainings go around that.

They're like, yeah, we want that. We're tired of saying, hey, you need to push pedagogy. You need to push rigor or rigor. Yeah, but I'm burning out. In a way, it's disheartening when, you know, like the first phases of training for us, we go in there and we do what we established, what we call psychological safety through Edmonton's work with a lot of our teachers. That's the biggest thing, like psychological safety with all of us. First, it's amazing, but it's also like painful when you see so many tears. They're like, wow, I'm so stressed out. And I use the piece there when I'm like, there's a stress activity.

We have three types of stress, y'all. How many stress levels do we have? Educators. Teachers are brilliant. They know everything. They're teaching the world how to be smart. And they're like ten, 12, 17, 20. They haven't done the investment. Like, it's not that they haven't they don't know how many stress levels sometimes. So when you don't have insight on that, you get overwhelmed with a lot of situations. So when we go in there we'll identify that. And it's super disheartening when you go into the toxic stress. One of the pieces that I say is, yeah, when we're here, we're waking up at we're waking up at these odd hours at night.

I've seen it with my wife. I've seen it with myself. Yeah. We're waking up at three, four in the morning. We're like, hey, I have all this energy. I'm thinking about all kinds of stuff, and you're not thinking about nothing. You know what? Let me just wake up. Let me do cardio. Hey, I'm already up. You get up, you're going to go brush your teeth, and now you feel like you feel like throwing up. What's happening? You're this parasympathetic. You're sympathy. You're up there, you're revved up and you're going. And you maybe get a cup of coffee and you're like, whoa, heart publication. Did that barista add another shot to my coffee?

No, you're just you're in that level of toxic stress. When teachers know that, you know, I'll take it back to like, hey, when I'm super stressed out, my house is the cleanest. Why does that happen? Control. Yes. And now, you know, even go back to cortisol. You know, you'll have some teacher like Mr. Alvarez. Is it? Does that mean that, you know this is going to get gross? Y'all just talked about all this. You know, I talk to them. How do we excrete that? I drool a lot when I'm super stressed out at night. And those moments of insight is what I'm looking for. Like, yes. What is that telling you?

That's giving us data where I'm at or was I at a couple hours ago? Yes. And now that's our that's our work. How do we help that educator stay optimal? We established a touchy feely the cohesion. But in a very scientific, systemized way, we tie in data because we need to create data streams. We've seen some schools that equity issues are you know, that's sometimes issues. You know we're seeing disproportionality of suspension. So data you know is the vector success there. We can't tell that school hey your race is because of this. Or hey these are not best practices data. Data is where it's at.

Hey. Well what does this mean. Yeah. And they're. Like, we all like something tangible. That's it. Because then we could a lot for that. So it sounds like you're a pretty big team. Huge. I feel huge for us because we're a mighty team. We're about 2024 of us. We have we're international. We're in Europe. Our Europe team focuses a lot in violence, interruption, the work on the horizontal and vertical alignment of violence. How does that happen? And is that with youth also. That's with adults. So they're more the focus on of developing the frameworks. What's informing violence interruption. Now we're really focusing on this whole word of restorative justice.

Yes restorative practices. But what is it really mitigating restorative justice is this act. Hey, I did something. Let me have this conversation scripted. But what happens in the in the back, right. The violence interruption. How do we interrupt that? That's what our main focus is in on. And we're actually with a lot of success. We University of Strasbourg in France became our scientific partners. And through those collaborations, we've met a lot of international research researchers from the Europe side. And we're hosting a conference in Crete, Greece, next year in June. So if you're in Greece, in Crete, Greece, we we have a conference there called Crack Culture Violence Interruption.

And it's a conference folk focused on all best practices, all the newest science. I'm so proud of you. Thank you. Look at all that you've done. I think it's when you're when you're able to tap into the situation of helping others. And when you have a product that allows others to heal and help humankind move forward, you're going to be successful. But it's hard to maintain it because of a lot of the is this really what we want to do comes to mind? You know, let's think about a couple of months ago with die, money was slashed. You know, a lot of our programs, we do a lot of that work. A lot of, you know, our a lot of our sister organizations went out of business because of that.

It hit a lot of our funding. And we're like, hey, okay, well, what are we going to do? We can still keep everyone on board or are we going to go into half staff? That's the scary part for us. We're like, no, no one else is doing this push forward. And on top of that, we were doing work. We also do a conference called Thrive Parent Summit in in Downey. And we invite all parents from all schools. So schools will work with schools. They bring in their parents, they bus them in. And it's a full day of learning brain regulation. And you get a lot of participation. A lot we got this was our first one we had we had over 100 parents, 11 school districts.

That's awesome. We have our new conference. This is in November 18th through the 19th. It's called Teen Arc, the Alliance for Community and Restorative Practices. And one of the focuses around that is bringing a lot of the science that influences a lot of our practices on restorative practices. That's happening at the Conrad Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. We booked that hotel for two days. That's great. And we'll we'll note these things. For you. Yes, we would love to see your audience. Certain people. They're your organization. Then you're 20 people. You've managed to maintain your 20 people.

How are you funded? Are you you're having fundraisers. Is it mostly coming from private? Yeah. So we're a corporation. And one of the biggest things for us, like growing up and doing the work, I was very much around a lot of nonprofits, nonprofits. And I was thinking like, okay, what do I what do I want to build? Is it nonprofit or is it this? And I you know, I made the decision to we're going to move away from the nonprofit side and be very aggressive with the corporate mindset on attracting business, but not the way we act with people. Our main work is going in there. How do we help these schools develop or either heal or also just become amazing?

Because we are in some schools that are like, hey, we're rock solid with everything else, but we want to be a pro-black anti-racist. Well, how do we push that? We have an entire team that's focused on that. It's you make it all seem like it's very simple. You know, I think for us, the same way we engage with our schools and our partners through this system, way of engaging the work is how we operate at LAIRP. At LAIRP, we have very amazing individuals. When example is we had a very heavy duty situation. We have a critical incident response team at LAIRP, and this is comprised of clinician, school psychologist, forensic psychologist, myself as a consultant and two directors.

We had a situation in a school where a student, male student, seventh grader stabbed his female girlfriend in front of in life class, 32 kids, ten inch butcher knife. Okay. Think about all this is happening in class. Horrible for everyone. Yes. Security guard came in, tackles a kid. Kid stabs himself. High. Heavy duty teachers crying. Everyone's crying. You can't just have class. Students experience something very traumatic. PTSD, like a lot of things are happening. We immediately get notified and we take over in essence, on the communication aspect, coaching the principal, bringing in parents.

Hey, because parents are going to say what happened, Mike? So how do we facilitate or how do we mobilize the communication piece? How do we create healing within those that structure? How do we talk to the rest of the teachers that heard about it but didn't witness it? How do we work with the teacher and the class that witnessed it? So that's our specialty. We'll go in there and do a lot of that work. We help them build a normal of psychological safety, this this semblance, and we start doing the work. So that is very specialized. Very specialized. Requiring unique talents. Yes. And a unique mindset.

Yes. And so for you to find those people who can carry that kind of thing out, it must be, must be some amount of work to find the individuals who have lived a life or who have studied to get to the place where they can do these things. Yes. Since I'm like people like Carlos, when are you hiring? When are you hiring? We don't just open up the books for hire. It's we grab the right person and that's how it's happened in LAIRP. We when I want you and the team wants him like we're going to. It's it's taken people a couple years to come into art because I know they're really good. I think at LAIRP, everyone really, genuinely enjoys being in the work because they actively feel the change they're making.

But the idea, I mean, it's just so refreshing to think that the idea of acknowledging, respecting one another's position, one another's feelings and and working from that as a base, I mean, truly working from love. It seems simple. However, it's clearly a lot of work. And you're you're working with individuals who, you know, at the ages that you're talking about. Everyone's struggling with who they really are, whether it's sort of in a safe set of circumstances or extreme circumstances. Each situation is unique. And in such a special time in our lives, we're really trying to figure out who we are and what's going on.

And so many of us are backing away from the idea of having feelings and for you to allow one individual and then perhaps their peers understand that that's okay, that it's not a weakness is so, so cool and so needed in so many venues on the face of this planet. Absolutely. Emotion is communication, you know, because it's communicating something. And especially when they're younger, you want to you always want to ask that question. You know what what happened and what do you need from me or what do you need from us? I'm trying to really do something different with how we run a corporation at LAIRP.

95% is female, strong PhD research, strong women. And for me, I'm like, wow, maybe this is part of my success because it's, you know, like I work with males, we've have males, you know, but it's it's it's very heavy. The feminine energy is very heavy. There I. Love that. That's oh my God, I, you know, it's don't get me started with that. My mom was, you know very strong figure there. But I think that's our magic power is the maternal feel of like, hey, we could still feel we still have you know, I follow a lot of the work of David Data, a lot of the masculine masculinity, feminine. And another focus that we want is even this whole situation of, we've had a couple of babies at LAIRP, what does this maternity leave look like for us?

And we're changing the the envelope on that. We want to center everything we do on this human essence, because that what you just said is, is what's missing. We just came back from from Europe. We were I was at I was in London at the European Conference for education. I presented there going out there. I like meeting with people and we were very talkative. We were really quick to to meet people consistently comes back where we feel really sorry for you guys, you know, like and I was like, you guys, what do you mean? Yeah. For Americans, you guys don't feel you guys are just doing things pretty quickly.

Well, that might seem like the external way of seeing it, you know? And I think for us, we just are living in this time that everything is so fast. It's hard to stop when you think about it. m.. Oh, let me, let me cook some food. m. you got to wake up next day. And it's it's this consistent situation. There is a lot of us having to run our lives with our intellect and and dismiss our emotions. There's just not enough time. You're just trying to put some food on the table. And that's when you start seeing this epidemic of people having panic attacks, and you have all this situation, these externalizing factors that are so overwhelming, you know, because when you start living on the intellectual, you start living on this left brain concept.

What starts happening because there is a moment that you have to discharge. And how is that discharge going to look? Yeah. And I mean, I think it's a great example and a good idea for all of us to really be paying attention to our physicality. Well, you have this gift your body is saying to you. Hey, look, there's some stuff going on in here that you're not attending to. And this, this package that holds all of that is starting to suffer. What are you going to do? Having that relationship with self is super important. There's so much communication that's happening when you're in the present moment, even when you're drinking water.

One of the things that we will say to teachers, hey, today when you're all like when we're going into lunch, make sure that you're chewing your food. Make sure that you're actually feeling it. Go inside. And it's like a like a foreign thought for them because they're always in procedural. Let's do, let's do let's do that email. It's still having too much of that is not okay for people like us that we're social creatures. We need we need to regulate, we need to exfoliate. And we're in this context, like in this box work, work. Do you know sometimes and it's and it's hard. It is it's hard. And the human experience is not that that is in support of what the real human experience is.

One highlight is, is being with each other and being in nature. But now, how do we even tap tap into nature when everything is cement around us? Yeah, yeah. Well, like you were talking about earlier, you know that just helping people get out into nature and understand how meaningful that is is, you know, a huge gift. You know, like, we would do a lot of camping tricks for our youth. And that was one of the biggest pieces that I saw that helped me build relationships. Times ten is when you're able to get individuals outside their context, outside their what? I feel that, okay, I'm here when you take them into an environment where nature is the most prevalent thing you see, and just a grounding effect of that, the disconnection of, hey, I don't have communication with my phone, so it's going to push me to engage in socialization.

And that has created so much of those small synchrony moments with, with a lot of the youth I work with. That's something we can all do. Yes, absolutely. Well, there's so much more to learn about what you're doing. And is there a website that our audience can go to? Yes. WW. I call it LAIRP. Sometimes we'll get like live action roleplay and they get a lot more laughter. But it's it's LAIRP, it's a huge name. We added the right brain research because we're doing a lot of the research around that and pushing the work. But yes, check us out LAIRP and do a lot of work around blogs, a lot of just research and, you know, promoting the work.

It's fascinating. And your success is heartwarming. I mean, literally heartwarming. And thank you and thank you for doing what you do. And thanks to all the people that support you. Please do come back again. There's so much more that I think you have to share with us. Absolutely. It would be an absolute pleasure. I really appreciate you having me here. And to your audience, just thank you for for enjoying and sitting in this moment with us. Thank you. Please follow, rate and share this important podcast and pass this episode along to someone who might need it. This is. And now, love. Listen to your dreams and live from your heart.

You so much.